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Pandora vs Last.fm (continued)
Last week, I walked into Jessica's room to see how she was doing on her homework and she said, "dad, check this out". So I looked on her screen and she was listening to Pandora while she was doing her homework. She had three channels; The Shout Out Louds, The Shins, and Belle and Sebastian. She was digging it.
I said, "check out last.fm and tell me what you think". She was doing fine with her homework, so I left her alone to finish it.
This weekend, we got out to our beach house where we listen to Rhapsody, Hype Machine, and a bunch of other web music services a lot. So Jessica turned on the computer that is connected to our stereo and went to last.fm and played Belle and Sebastian "similar artist" radio.
So I asked Jessica "what about Pandora?". She said "they are both good, but last.fm is a little better". I explained to her that Pandora uses "music genomes" that are then processed by a computer to come up with its recommendations. Whereas last.fm simply looks at what people listen to and makes its recommendations based on "people who like this like that". She got it immediately.
Jessica and I are not the only ones who think last.fm is better than pandora. These are the Comscore worldwide numbers for both services:
Clearly the social, people powered approach of last.fm is more popular. No surprise there. I would note that according to Comscore last.fm has 5-6mm unique visitors worldwide per month, a far cry from the 15 million that was mentioned in this Techcrunch piece. I think last.fm is suffering from some of the same issues that Digg is suffering from in using their internal weblog numbers.
Regardless of whether it is 5mm uniques a month or 15mm uniques a month, it's clear that last.fm is a big success. I love it and use it all the time. The new flash player is a vast improvement over the client and I like similar artist radio a lot although I still prefer neighbor radio and recommended radio the best.
But it's also the social networking features of last.fm that make it a superior service. Last.fm started off as a social network and evovled into a streaming music service. Pandora took the opposite approach. And it shows.
I am fredwilson at last.fm. If you are a last.fm user,let's connect and share music .
Comments (17) | Posted November 24, 2006 in My Music , Venture Capital and Technology
Comments
In general, I could care beans about the social networking aspect of Last.fm. The reason I like it better is that it learns when I listen to my own Itunes library, as opposed to only when I listen to the streaming service.
That said, Fred, I just added you as a friend :)
Posted by: Mike Orren | Nov 24, 2006 1:36:46 PM
Pandora has two main problems.
First. Someone in official-dom at Pandora needs to know about the music and it needs to be "genomed". This is great for finding mainstream music, but it doesn't scale for the long tail. Tha analogy in search is Google killed the Yahoo! surfer model.
Second. The response of a listener to music is inherently an emotional one, not an intellectual one. Pandora's rating system is based on an intellectual evaluation of music, not an emotional one.
Posted by: Erik Schwartz | Nov 24, 2006 2:16:10 PM
I'm in agreement with you Fred - Last.fm is a better experience than Pandora.
Would love to see someone build a subscription service (like Yahoo Music Unlimited) around Last.FM and move it beyond the radio station metaphor. Adding the ability to download music to PCs/MP3 players so that I can take their experience with me on the road/plane would be worth paying for. I’d like it to be easier to share specific tracks, albums, or artists with friends via Last.fm (there is real power in friend-to-friend recommendations) and to build personal playlists within their service.
Yahoo has part of the experience there already with Launchcast/YMU but their folks should crib notes from the Last.FM team (or buy them and integrate the experience – otherwise it’ll end up bothering Brad Garlinghouse).
Did you get a chance to listen to The Fratellis yet? I should have flipped you an MP3 with my email. You’ve been added to my last.fm friend list. In the spirit of sharing, you might want to check out http://john.theobriens.ca/mixtapes where I post some of my Yahoo Music playlists. Let me know what you think/like.
Cheers,
Johnny
Posted by: Johnny O'Brien | Nov 24, 2006 3:23:15 PM
Hey Fred, here's a great music story where YouTube is actually "breaking" an unsigned artist...
The band is named Obadiah Parker (Phoenix) - their website is:
http://www.obadiahparker.com/
They were playing at a local coffee shop in Phoenix and recorded an acoustic version of Outkast's "Hey Ya" - it was mixed and put on YouTube and now the band is getting all sorts of national attention and hopefully a record deal.
Here is the YouTube link to the video - it's amazing...
http://youtube.com/watch?v=8-8nkkOA_AM
Here is some news coverage links:
Arizona Republic: http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/arizonaliving/articles/1002heyya1002.html
KPNX News:
mms://wms.azcentral.com/kpnx/news/1011heyya.wmv
Hope you enjoy, the song's been in my head for a week...
Take care - Dan
Posted by: Dan | Nov 24, 2006 4:08:35 PM
Fred, what are your thoughts on MyStrands? They are missing the fulfillment piece (e.g. radio), but it seems like they've cooked up some pretty cool stuff themselves.
Posted by: J | Nov 24, 2006 4:46:00 PM
Having always prided myself in having unique, hard to please taste (aka total music snob), I'm consistently amazed how much great new stuff my Last.fm neighbors turn me on to. Just because I like a song or two from a certain band, doesn't mean that I like the band. While a few tracks from a certain style or genre may make me happy, too much will make me ill. Certain people just innately tune into similar things, yet it's really hard to scientifically pinpoint the common thread. There also is a sense of community and adventure when listening to somebody else's station. Even if low on the 'Taste-o-meter', you may give a friend/person a try because they're an authority, expert, or trusted source (for a particular sound or style). Sometimes you just want to listen to the musical make-up of a person (a musician, celebrity, acquaintance, or just some random guy whose blog you're reading).
Still would like to see Last.fm or another service give users a way to actually create/share a custom playlist or even stream their own radio show (ala Live365). Also would be great if we could just embed the Last.fm flash player into our website, blog, or social network.
All in all, it's a pretty amazing time to both discover AND create music. Can't wait to see what's next....
Posted by: Gus Austin | Nov 24, 2006 8:01:05 PM
Before last.fm I was a big fan of Shoutcast, but last.fm simply works better. The "similar" artist radio is awesome, but when you subscribe for a few $ you get to broadcast your own station, without banner ads, and you can listen to just the songs you like instead of selections from a "radio station". I think it's worth the subscription price.
Also, last I checked the Last.fm stream is 128kbps, but Myspace and Yahoo streams are much lower quality.
The social networking aspect doesn't seem important until you've been using it a while and someone contacts you with similar listening habits. A musical neighbor of mine is an architect, went to school for painting (like I did) and drives a black Golf (like I did until just recently).
Try it.
Posted by: PJ | Nov 25, 2006 8:58:01 AM
I am embarrassed to say it, but I am using a 2003 Dell PC, and Last.Fm gunked it up so badly, I disliked using it in conjunction with iTunes. Also, I did not readily understand how it was keeping track of the music I was listening to. I am going to give it a second try.
Recommendation engines - iLike is interesting for its integration with the iTunes store. Pandora I need to play with a bit more.
The Hype Machine has been a god send for finding new music.
But it sounds like I have to be a little more patient with Last.Fm and go back and learn it. And also get a faster PC.
Chuck Fishman
Posted by: Chuck Fishman | Nov 26, 2006 8:33:50 AM
I've enjoyed elements of Pandora and LastFM for some time now, and at www.finetune.com we've tried to extend the community-oriented discovery experience.
In addition to "artist radio", users can create their own playlists track-by-track from our (major and indie) catalog and listen to any other user's playlist.
Users can also embed their playlists in blogs or MySpace pages.
We think it's pretty cool, so please give it a shot!
Posted by: Martin Kay | Nov 27, 2006 3:42:24 PM
Erik Schwartz hit the nail on the head - Pandora doesn't have a scalable system. It's too bad, because I appreciate that they're trying to create a "smart" categorization system based on meta data.
In related music news - If you haven't already seen it, check out Sellaband.com. They have a really unique approach to "discovering" new artists - and one of the few social media business models that's not fully dependent on ad revenue.
Posted by: Kate Zimmermann | Nov 27, 2006 5:24:39 PM
Has anyone checked out Mog.com? That site has HUGE capabilities for social networking and especially for discovering people with similar musical tastes. No radio feature, unfortunately, but it does something that Last.fm doesn't: it uploads a list of your entire music library and puts that on your profile, rather than just the songs you happen to play (though it keeps track of that as well). Mog matches you with other users based on the entire contents of your library. I prefer Mog's method because it's not susceptible to the user's latest favorite songs. Check it out: www.mog.com
Posted by: Zack | Dec 3, 2006 8:21:06 PM
HI guys!THERE is a great site with cool music best mp3 downloads where you can find the newest albums. HAve fun there!!!
Posted by: firemp3 | Dec 12, 2006 5:50:32 AM
Expand your Pandora experience at...
http://pandorastations.crispynews.com
Thanks!
Tim
Posted by: Tim | Dec 17, 2006 12:37:42 AM
You can embed the last.fm player into your website, forum etc. They just don't provide you the code straight out...
Posted by: TSW | Dec 19, 2006 7:56:47 AM
Anyone given finetune a try? I'm a Last.FM person myself but it's pretty interesting. Different than the audioscrobbling/personal radio of Last.FM in that you build your own playlists. You have to fill a playlist with 45 songs before you can play / share.
I'm a fan of the their player interface. Much better than the standard car stereo style.
Also, they just released a site optimized for the Nintento Wii Opera browser. It's a large, flash based player that makes it easy to access a web-based app on the tv in your living room. I'm looking forward to seeing more apps that have larger interfaces optimized for larger display interaction.
www.finetune.com/wii
Posted by: Matt | Jan 5, 2007 1:12:57 PM
Ad me to the list -- after listening to both Pandora and Last.fm -- I just enjoy Last more and find better new music -- it's really great...
Posted by: John Pasmore | Mar 5, 2007 6:56:25 PM
Personally I prefer Live365, Shoutcast and Pandora. Last.FM is nice but I really don't like the audioscrobbler program that gets installed. It slows down iTunes to a crawl whenever I try to open it and the playlists on last.fm are subject only to what you may be listening to on any given moment instead of a playlist of songs that truly happen to be your favorites.
However this mog.com and finetune.com sound very interesting. I'll check them out.
Posted by: vargas | Apr 22, 2007 4:19:44 PM
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